From The Stone Roses to Gramsci: How mainstream music was purged of intellectualism
From the anti-war lyrics of Lennon, to the fierce, rasping attacks on Western institutions of The Clash, the rhythm of Britain's musical mainstream was ostensibly upheld by a cemented chord of politically radical, anti-establishment artists, who coupled the mass sale of records with popular anthems in disgust at the misuse of authority - be it the Vietnam War, or the ideological scope of the Thatcher government, for instance. Yet what appeared to be a vital string in the instrumentals of British music, appears to have vanished; bands and artists that actively engage, through musical and other, social means, in explicitly political protest, have simply disappeared. The UK singles chart only this week, was headed by Gary Barlow's song in celebration of the British Monarchy, and elsewhere, remains peppered by tunes of a typically 'misogynistic', individualistic, 'racially stereotyping', 'sexist' lyrical construct as rapper Akala describes, rather than in challenge to a specific 'political agenda'. Barlow's use of Kenyans in his song's video may well be some sort of vile joke, considering Britain's contemptible imperial history within the region and the local populace's continued fight for justice against the crimes of British rule, yet this has been discussed previously on this blog.
Two questions require address: what exactly is the historical foundation between popular music and explicitly radical politics in the UK, and furthermore, why and how has this foundation been discarded without further construction?
Two questions require address: what exactly is the historical foundation between popular music and explicitly radical politics in the UK, and furthermore, why and how has this foundation been discarded without further construction?
It would be useful to define the exact terms of 'mainstream British music'; by this, it is the music that receives popular exposure within the UK - and this of course, may include artists from abroad - and receives chart success, prime radio-time and popular acclaim, that is referred to. It could quite easily be extended to the Western world as a whole with similar analysis, yet for the purposes of time and length, this article shall focus on mainstream music within the United Kingdom.
Artists in Britain at one stage, appeared genuinely politically engaged and active; the former lead singer of The Smiths, Morrissey, has spoken of Britain's 'depressing' colonial history and the atrocious crimes committed against the Irish populace in the 1649 invasion, while at the same time, despairingly accusing the modern duopoly of the British state as nothing other than an 'aged and ridiculous circus'. 'Beatle' George Harrison was a committed pacifist, with a developed devotion to Hindu philosophy, preaching a flexibility of human nature in its capacity to, given the correct application, achieve accordance with a body of morality. 'Pop stars' thought with care and nuance about society, and the operation of human beings in relation to one another. John Lennon’s hit-single, ‘Imagine’, yearned for a utopian, stateless world of peace, carefully guiding listeners to envisage ‘no country...a brotherhood of man’, to the delicacy of Lennon’s piano, before proclaiming a humanity that 'shares all the world' in chorus. The Smiths’ ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ drew commercial grain from the field of public anger directed at Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Even music stars from abroad, that found success in the British market, were often of a distinct political bent; the 1968 Woodstock Festival marked a period of cultural protest in the United States, of which music, from Jimi Hendrix to The Who, formed a vital part. The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album of 1989 offered political radicalism’s final stand in the mainstream of British music; adorned by Jackson Pollock-inspired, abstract-expressional art on the cover sleeve and then riddled with a variety of thought-provoking themes, from the institutional manipulation of religion in ‘I Am the Resurrection’ to the corruption of representative politics in ‘Sugar Spun Sister’, the record is regarded as one of the finest English albums of the last two decades. Maintaining what at the time, was an ostensible tradition, the ‘Roses both talked and composed in explicit, political language. Vocalist Ian Brown and lead-guitarist John Squire had been members of the Socialist Worker’s Party; the former had studied the work of the French Marxist and ‘situationist’, Guy Debord, and together with Squire, detailed the ‘situationist’ thrust of the student uprising in Paris, 1968, in a song within the album named ‘Bye Bye Badman’. The situationist concept of direct political and cultural action, through which further action and revolt may be prompted, and its success against authority in the Paris protests is personified in the song; Brown and Squire take the view of a protesting student facing the police, asserting ‘your dock’s no holy shrine’, and through sibilance – ‘citrus sucking sunshine’ – articulating the subtle nous and intelligence of the loud rioters, who chewed on lemons in order to combat the effects of tear gas.
Visionary projections of utopia, damning assessments of authority, historical accounts of revolutionary movement; one could be forgiven for mistaking the likes of Lennon and Brown for prominent political theorists and intellectual essayists, and this, essentially, presents the crux of ‘explicitly political music’. It offers social critique in the form of musical composition, which in itself blurs the stratification of art and media. From essays and biographies through music, to novels and poetry, observances and ideas of society may be expressed and detailed. Lennon’s utopia could have been presented in the form of a manifesto or an allegorical novel, while Brown and Squire’s account of Paris could have been neatly served within a short newspaper article. It’s this capacity for direct political translation and social significance, via ideas and social observances, that defines the era of political music and most certainly, is lacking in the work of contemporary, popular artists.
Yet this is not to suggest that current, mainstream music is lacking in any political significance whatsoever. Of course, contemporary popular artists in Britain such as the pop-group One Direction or the American singer, Katy Perry, do not express distinctly political opinions or offer cutting social commentary, in either their interviews or records – although some artists occasionally do – yet their music does hold a certain weighting of implicit social commentary, in that their music fails to offer explicit social commentary. It prompts the question of ‘why not?’ Why is it that music of a radical political bent, an explicitly political standpoint or that offers a degree of social critique, is not afforded popular exposure? Is the music industry itself preventing the proliferation of these records? Why? How? Is it simply that these records do not appeal phonetically to listeners? If so, why are these records not offered the same production care provided to other artists? Or is there merely a lack of critically-minded individuals interested in creating music, and if so, why? Is it symptomatic of a wider political apathy among the native populace? How has this come about? In this broader, cultural sense, the nature of mainstream music as an industrial entity offers a symptom of the health and physique of a society.
What exactly then, does an absence of a political lobe from the cerebrum of mainstream music, suggest about British or indeed, Western society? Certainly, it invokes the idea that music to a certain degree, has been manipulated or captured by power. Lowkey describes the instance of Jay-Z being photographed in the White House, and poses the pertinent question, just who’s interests exactly, are these artists - who are regularly seen, hand in hand with powerful figures - serving? Far from bands that compose and in some cases, actively demonstrate against power, the waters of mainstream music appear greenly polluted by musicians that serve the interests of power. Not only are contemporary, popular artists often easily subverted to the agenda of power, as in the case of Jay-Z, and the artists who have recently performed at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert or those who played at Barack Obama’s Presidential-victory parade in 2010, yet the lyrical content produced by these artists while again, not explicitly serving power, aids the interests of authority in the ideas and themes it conveys. Music is a medium through which any given set of ideas and themes may be proliferated, and be transmitted en masse to a given, wider audience. Contemporary themes of sexuality, racial stereotypes and individualism thus, be it with intention or not, ultimately steer the carriage of public thought away from the scrutiny of political authority and social critique offered by The Stone Roses and The Clash, and instead, towards notions of an autonomous, private sphere through which each individual may improve their lives; via sex or successfully courting sexual partners, the private accumulation of capital and the purchase of drugs, for instance. And this is quite a remarkable, essential shift; the notion that individuals should strive for improvements in their lives privately, rather than through a public, collective struggle. Indeed, this notion offers political authority certain insulation against public scrutiny in that it perpetuates and promotes political apathy, and is the crux of Akala’s assertion that contemporary mainstream music, rather than having ‘lost its politics’, has simply been subverted to a ‘dominant political agenda’, as opposed to explicitly challenging it.
The work of the 20th century Italian writer, Antonio Gramsci, offers an instrumental tool in analysing the redefining of mainstream music’s contours, through the concept of the hegemony. Hegemony, Gramsci describes, is a type of power that penetrates and punctures each facet of society, that determines ‘consciousness’ and a ‘morality in conformity with a [given] conception of the world’, such that one’s ‘whole philosophy’ may be reformed. As T.J. Jackson Lears describes, a given hegemony attempts to ‘subordinate’ the components of society to an ‘existing social order’; is it through the hegemony of Western politics, that mainstream music has been diluted of an intellectually radical concentration? This disappearance of radical mainstream music since the mid-late 1980s, does appear to coincide with the emergence of cementation of the neoliberal consensus; the general acceptance, following the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US in 1979 and 1981 respectively, of minimal government, individualism and private property – notions rather similar to those found in contemporary music. Not only in music, yet even through the paradigms of higher education, mainstream art and journalism, the last two decades have also seen a turn away from nuanced, intellectual social critique and instead, towards the approval of a general, ‘neoliberal’ consensus which simply accepts the terms and principles upon which power is based, rather than truly challenging them.
Patently, the political significance of music has been severely reshaped over the past thirty years and crucially, this transformation is symptomatic of a much deeper restructuring of society as a whole. The ‘mainstream’ of any given field, is turf that requires fighting over. The dominant set of ideas of Western society as a whole, require intellectual confrontation and challenge, for the radical branch of mainstream music to be reseeded and reinstated.
Artists in Britain at one stage, appeared genuinely politically engaged and active; the former lead singer of The Smiths, Morrissey, has spoken of Britain's 'depressing' colonial history and the atrocious crimes committed against the Irish populace in the 1649 invasion, while at the same time, despairingly accusing the modern duopoly of the British state as nothing other than an 'aged and ridiculous circus'. 'Beatle' George Harrison was a committed pacifist, with a developed devotion to Hindu philosophy, preaching a flexibility of human nature in its capacity to, given the correct application, achieve accordance with a body of morality. 'Pop stars' thought with care and nuance about society, and the operation of human beings in relation to one another. John Lennon’s hit-single, ‘Imagine’, yearned for a utopian, stateless world of peace, carefully guiding listeners to envisage ‘no country...a brotherhood of man’, to the delicacy of Lennon’s piano, before proclaiming a humanity that 'shares all the world' in chorus. The Smiths’ ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ drew commercial grain from the field of public anger directed at Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Even music stars from abroad, that found success in the British market, were often of a distinct political bent; the 1968 Woodstock Festival marked a period of cultural protest in the United States, of which music, from Jimi Hendrix to The Who, formed a vital part. The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album of 1989 offered political radicalism’s final stand in the mainstream of British music; adorned by Jackson Pollock-inspired, abstract-expressional art on the cover sleeve and then riddled with a variety of thought-provoking themes, from the institutional manipulation of religion in ‘I Am the Resurrection’ to the corruption of representative politics in ‘Sugar Spun Sister’, the record is regarded as one of the finest English albums of the last two decades. Maintaining what at the time, was an ostensible tradition, the ‘Roses both talked and composed in explicit, political language. Vocalist Ian Brown and lead-guitarist John Squire had been members of the Socialist Worker’s Party; the former had studied the work of the French Marxist and ‘situationist’, Guy Debord, and together with Squire, detailed the ‘situationist’ thrust of the student uprising in Paris, 1968, in a song within the album named ‘Bye Bye Badman’. The situationist concept of direct political and cultural action, through which further action and revolt may be prompted, and its success against authority in the Paris protests is personified in the song; Brown and Squire take the view of a protesting student facing the police, asserting ‘your dock’s no holy shrine’, and through sibilance – ‘citrus sucking sunshine’ – articulating the subtle nous and intelligence of the loud rioters, who chewed on lemons in order to combat the effects of tear gas.
Visionary projections of utopia, damning assessments of authority, historical accounts of revolutionary movement; one could be forgiven for mistaking the likes of Lennon and Brown for prominent political theorists and intellectual essayists, and this, essentially, presents the crux of ‘explicitly political music’. It offers social critique in the form of musical composition, which in itself blurs the stratification of art and media. From essays and biographies through music, to novels and poetry, observances and ideas of society may be expressed and detailed. Lennon’s utopia could have been presented in the form of a manifesto or an allegorical novel, while Brown and Squire’s account of Paris could have been neatly served within a short newspaper article. It’s this capacity for direct political translation and social significance, via ideas and social observances, that defines the era of political music and most certainly, is lacking in the work of contemporary, popular artists.
Yet this is not to suggest that current, mainstream music is lacking in any political significance whatsoever. Of course, contemporary popular artists in Britain such as the pop-group One Direction or the American singer, Katy Perry, do not express distinctly political opinions or offer cutting social commentary, in either their interviews or records – although some artists occasionally do – yet their music does hold a certain weighting of implicit social commentary, in that their music fails to offer explicit social commentary. It prompts the question of ‘why not?’ Why is it that music of a radical political bent, an explicitly political standpoint or that offers a degree of social critique, is not afforded popular exposure? Is the music industry itself preventing the proliferation of these records? Why? How? Is it simply that these records do not appeal phonetically to listeners? If so, why are these records not offered the same production care provided to other artists? Or is there merely a lack of critically-minded individuals interested in creating music, and if so, why? Is it symptomatic of a wider political apathy among the native populace? How has this come about? In this broader, cultural sense, the nature of mainstream music as an industrial entity offers a symptom of the health and physique of a society.
What exactly then, does an absence of a political lobe from the cerebrum of mainstream music, suggest about British or indeed, Western society? Certainly, it invokes the idea that music to a certain degree, has been manipulated or captured by power. Lowkey describes the instance of Jay-Z being photographed in the White House, and poses the pertinent question, just who’s interests exactly, are these artists - who are regularly seen, hand in hand with powerful figures - serving? Far from bands that compose and in some cases, actively demonstrate against power, the waters of mainstream music appear greenly polluted by musicians that serve the interests of power. Not only are contemporary, popular artists often easily subverted to the agenda of power, as in the case of Jay-Z, and the artists who have recently performed at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert or those who played at Barack Obama’s Presidential-victory parade in 2010, yet the lyrical content produced by these artists while again, not explicitly serving power, aids the interests of authority in the ideas and themes it conveys. Music is a medium through which any given set of ideas and themes may be proliferated, and be transmitted en masse to a given, wider audience. Contemporary themes of sexuality, racial stereotypes and individualism thus, be it with intention or not, ultimately steer the carriage of public thought away from the scrutiny of political authority and social critique offered by The Stone Roses and The Clash, and instead, towards notions of an autonomous, private sphere through which each individual may improve their lives; via sex or successfully courting sexual partners, the private accumulation of capital and the purchase of drugs, for instance. And this is quite a remarkable, essential shift; the notion that individuals should strive for improvements in their lives privately, rather than through a public, collective struggle. Indeed, this notion offers political authority certain insulation against public scrutiny in that it perpetuates and promotes political apathy, and is the crux of Akala’s assertion that contemporary mainstream music, rather than having ‘lost its politics’, has simply been subverted to a ‘dominant political agenda’, as opposed to explicitly challenging it.
The work of the 20th century Italian writer, Antonio Gramsci, offers an instrumental tool in analysing the redefining of mainstream music’s contours, through the concept of the hegemony. Hegemony, Gramsci describes, is a type of power that penetrates and punctures each facet of society, that determines ‘consciousness’ and a ‘morality in conformity with a [given] conception of the world’, such that one’s ‘whole philosophy’ may be reformed. As T.J. Jackson Lears describes, a given hegemony attempts to ‘subordinate’ the components of society to an ‘existing social order’; is it through the hegemony of Western politics, that mainstream music has been diluted of an intellectually radical concentration? This disappearance of radical mainstream music since the mid-late 1980s, does appear to coincide with the emergence of cementation of the neoliberal consensus; the general acceptance, following the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US in 1979 and 1981 respectively, of minimal government, individualism and private property – notions rather similar to those found in contemporary music. Not only in music, yet even through the paradigms of higher education, mainstream art and journalism, the last two decades have also seen a turn away from nuanced, intellectual social critique and instead, towards the approval of a general, ‘neoliberal’ consensus which simply accepts the terms and principles upon which power is based, rather than truly challenging them.
Patently, the political significance of music has been severely reshaped over the past thirty years and crucially, this transformation is symptomatic of a much deeper restructuring of society as a whole. The ‘mainstream’ of any given field, is turf that requires fighting over. The dominant set of ideas of Western society as a whole, require intellectual confrontation and challenge, for the radical branch of mainstream music to be reseeded and reinstated.
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